Words of Wisdom from TMQ

I've really started to look forward to Tuesday morning so I can read Gregg Easterbrook's stuff on TMQ on ESPN. His football commentary is very good, particularly when he writes in his notebook that the game is over.

His commentary on other things is even better. One example:

"Next Stephen King Auto-Written Formulaic Horror Novel -- "The School Bus": Some parents drive their children to school, rather than let them ride the bus, because school buses do not have seat belts. This is a classic case of perceived versus real risk. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figures show that school buses are by far the safest form of passenger vehicle -- a child is about eight times safer in a school bus than riding in a parent's car to school. That school buses lack seat belts pales before the fact that they get into crashes far less often than other types of vehicles. School buses are huge and bright yellow, and drivers make way for them; the result is that collisions involving school buses are rare.

Parents misperceive the risks of riding school buses because whenever there is a school bus fatality anywhere in the country, it is national news; deaths of schoolchildren in their parents' cars don't make CNN. This kind of media-generated anxiety causes us to fear small risks such as riding school buses or drinking tap water, while shrugging at significant risks such as crossing the street, riding motorcycles or breathing indoor air. The latter is a good example of mixed-up modern risk perception. Research shows that indoor air is almost always less healthful than outdoor air; this is true even during most episodes of summer smog. When local weathermen say, "There's an ozone warning today, stay indoors with your air conditioner cranked up," they are advising you to stay where the air quality is worse. Rising asthma rates might relate to children spending ever more time indoors, breathing lower-quality air, rather than outdoors breathing cleaner air. (All forms of outdoor air pollution have been declining since about 1980, regardless which party holds the White House.) Get your kids out of the house and onto the school bus!"

I would like very much to have a job writing things like that.